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Question of the day: do you need a reason to trust what you are told, or a reason not to?

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Evidence & testimonyIndianModern EuropeanEmpiricismNyayaDavid HumeDignāgaGautama (Akṣapāda)Thomas Reid#credulity#question-of-the-day#testimony#trust
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Its coordinates: 2.2.4 Testimony

Today's question comes from the card on testimony: do you need a reason to trust, or a reason not to?

Most of what any of us believes, we were told: our own date of birth, the shape of the continents, that the tablet in the cupboard is what the label says. Very little of it have we checked for ourselves.

So which is the default?

  • Trust first. Believing what people tell you is the starting position, like believing your eyes. You need a reason to withhold belief: a liar's record, a motive, a claim that clashes with what you already know.
  • Check first. What you are told earns belief only when you have some independent reason to think that this source, on this kind of matter, tends to be right.

Thomas Reid took the first side in the eighteenth century, and Hume is usually read as taking the second. In India the Nyāya school counted the word of a reliable person as a means of knowledge in its own right, while the Buddhist logician Dignāga folded it into inference. The card sets out the rival answers and the people behind them: 2.2.4 Testimony.

Answer in your own terms. A case from your own week (a doctor, a forwarded message, a stranger giving directions) is as welcome as a theory.

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6 answers

  1. Wanjiru Njenga

    Fellow

    Check first, but be honest about what checking is. When I check a claim, I usually check it against another source that I also haven't verified. The chain ends in somebody's say-so either way.

    So I'd put it like this: the default is trust, and what we call checking is mostly choosing whom to trust. Reid wins the starting position. Hume wins the discipline.

  2. Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya

    Fellow

    The Indian debate had a third position that the two bullet points leave out, and I think it is the most interesting one.

    The question there was not only about testimony but about every cognition: is a cognition known to be valid by itself, or only by something outside it? The Mīmāṃsakas, with Kumārila as the clearest voice, said validity is intrinsic (svataḥ prāmāṇya). Any cognition, from the eyes or from words, is to be accepted as it presents itself, and only invalidity needs outside grounds: a defect in the senses, a contradicting cognition, an untrustworthy speaker. That is Reid's trust-first position, but made general and argued for, and Kumārila needed it because he wanted the Veda, which has no author, to be self-validating.

    The Naiyāyikas disagreed. For them both validity and invalidity are established from outside, typically by whether acting on the cognition succeeds. Yet they also kept testimony (śabda) as a separate means of knowledge, defined in the Nyāya Sūtra as the instruction of a reliable person (āpta). So Nyāya trusts testimony as a source, but checks every particular cognition. That is close to Wanjiru's answer, centuries early.

  3. Baraka Mwakyusa

    Contributor

    Trust first. Otherwise I would never have learned to read. My teacher said "this is A" and I did not ask her for evidence.

  4. Alistair Gow

    Fellow

    Hume is more interesting here than his reputation. Section X of the Enquiry, the essay on miracles, does say that our confidence in testimony comes from experience, from having observed that reports usually match the facts. And it contains the famous line, "A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence." (Project Gutenberg text.) That is the check-first side, plainly stated.

    But notice that Hume is arguing about extraordinary reports, not about whether you may believe the post office when it says your parcel has arrived. For ordinary testimony he thinks experience has long since done the checking, and we are entitled to rely on it.

    The serious objection to him came much later, from C. A. J. Coady in his 1992 book Testimony. Coady pointed out that no single person has observed anything like enough reports matching facts to ground the induction Hume describes. Most of what I know about which sources are reliable I was told. If Hume needs individual observation to underwrite trust, the books do not balance. So either we trust first, as Reid said, or we borrow the community's track record, which is already a kind of trust.

    I end up roughly where Wanjiru did. Trust first, then let the evidence revise. The difference between a wise man and a credulous one is not where he starts but whether he is still listening.

  5. Pieter van Dijkhuizen

    Fellow

    Is there a good short introduction to the trust-first versus check-first argument? Preferably not a whole book. I'd like to send it to someone who thinks the answer is obviously "check everything".

  6. Kenneth Lam Chi-ho

    Fellow

    The Stanford Encyclopedia entry Epistemological Problems of Testimony is the place to start. It sets out exactly this argument, under the names reductionism (check first) and non-reductionism (trust first), with Hume and Reid as the usual ancestors. It also gives the standard objection to trust-first: that it seems to license believing an anonymous blogger. Your friend will like that part.